Tahoe’s holiday ski season needs snow, none in forecast

At the snow stake located near Sky Express at Heavenly Mountain Resort near South Lake Tahoe, the gauge is dry and bare on Sunday morning, December 10, 2017, with no storms forecast in the long range outlook.

At the snow stake located near Sky Express at Heavenly Mountain Resort near South Lake Tahoe, the gauge is dry and bare on Sunday morning, December 10, 2017, with no storms forecast in the long range outlook.

Photo: Tom Stienstra, Courtesy Heavenly, Special To The Chronicle

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At the East Peak Lodge at Heavenly at South Lake Tahoe on Sunday morning, there were many takers despite spare early-season snow conditions

At the East Peak Lodge at Heavenly at South Lake Tahoe on Sunday morning, there were many takers despite spare early-season snow conditions

Photo: Tom Stienstra, Courtesy Heavenly / Special To The Chronicle

Tahoe’s holiday ski season needs snow, none in forecast

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On Sunday morning at Tahoe, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The long-range outlook, though not always reliable, showed no storms into early January.

There’s hardly a soul there who isn’t concerned about the lack of snow in the forecast across the Sierra, Cascade and Shasta-Siskiyou ranges. The Christmas and New Year’s holidays, popular times for skiing, snowboarding and other winter sports, are a couple of weeks away.

At Tahoe last winter, some resorts reported more than 800 inches of snowfall. Mammoth Mountain had a verified snowpack of 30 feet on the crest. This winter started big, too. By the beginning of December, it already had rained 30 inches at Stouts Meadow on the Upper McCloud River, for instance. In the greater Tahoe region, it snowed enough in late November, and was cushioned by snowmaking on recent cold nights, that 10 of 13 ski areas were open in some capacity this past weekend: Squaw Valley/Alpine Meadows, Northstar, Heavenly, Kirkwood, Mount Rose, Sierra-at-Tahoe, Sugar Bowl, Boreal, Tahoe Donner and Soda Springs.

That strong start has been followed by days with cold mornings (10 degrees in Truckee on Sunday morning) and warm afternoons (high in the 50s), often with crystal-clear blue skies.

Lifts and runs have opened and closed to the point that some reports of operations are out of date and unreliable. On Sunday at Heavenly, a favorite for the dramatic views of South Lake Tahoe, the East Peak Lodge was in operation with plenty of takers on groomed runs. But near Sky Express, the stake that measures snowfall was dry and bare. Homewood, Diamond Peak and Donner Ski Ranch remain closed.

The warm afternoons across ski country make it ideal to hike, boat or fish — not ski.

Yet in Houston, of all places, it snowed 3 inches Friday. This is the same place in August that Hurricane Harvey hammered and flooded.

Some climatologists believe “severe is followed by severe,” like a swing: The farther you pull back the swing on one side, the farther it will later swing on the other.